OriginBuilt from a problem I had
I'm Josh Torrent. I've spent the last decade inside the music industry — managing artists, building small tools nobody asked me to build, mostly working alone.
The problem that triggered Backline was simple. Three years of Instagram DMs had piled up: bookers, promoters, label folks, fellow producers, journalists. Real conversations with real opportunities, buried under reposts and forgotten threads. Instagram's search couldn't find them. Scrolling through hundreds of conversations didn't help. The data existed. I just couldn't see it.
So I exported the archive and wrote the parser I wished existed. 774 conversations, 591 qualified contacts, 104 lost ones recovered. The result was a structured Notion list I actually use. Backline is that pipeline, packaged so other solo artists can run it on their own archive.
SoloNo team, no funding, no SaaS bloat
Backline is run by me, alone. No co-founders, no employees, no investors expecting a 10× return in 18 months. There's no Series A roadmap, no land-grab, no "we're hiring" page hidden behind the marketing copy.
Pricing reflects that. One-time payments only. Free tier for the first 20 contacts. €99 for one full run. €199 for unlimited (with a sane cap of one run per month). €79 for bring-your-own-key if you'd rather use your own Anthropic API key. No subscription on any tier.
That makes Backline a lifestyle business by design, not a startup. The target is sustainability — covering the API costs, paying for my time honestly, and staying small enough to keep moving.
StanceWhy your DMs never leave your browser
The privacy model is structural, not marketing copy. Your Instagram export is parsed entirely in your browser. The zip file is never uploaded. We don't see your conversations, we don't store them, we couldn't hand them over even if a court asked.
The only thing that touches a server is the text of qualified conversations, sent to Anthropic's Claude API for narrative summarization — proxied through a Cloudflare Worker so we don't have to share an API key with your browser. Nothing is logged. Nothing is retained server-side. Full breakdown on the privacy page.
ReachHow to actually contact me
Email is the only support channel: [email protected]. Replies come from me. There's no ticket queue, no help-desk software, no chatbot.
If you're a music professional with a use case I haven't thought of — bigger archives, multi-account export, Telegram or WhatsApp parsing — I want to hear it. The roadmap is shaped by actual users, not pitch decks.
LAST UPDATED · 2026-04-26